Hi, I'm Samantha. I'm a small business owner and I work here at Shopify. Ninety-three percent of consumers consider visuals before making an online purchase. This means your product photos and lifestyle photography are an essential element of your e-commerce store. Lifestyle photos portray people or your product in different situations or real life events. This is an example of a product photo for tea. Simple, easy to understand and on a white background, so there are no distractions.
And this is a lifestyle image that might be for the same site. The tea is no longer the main subject. Lifestyle photos give you an opportunity to build an emotional connection with a potential customer. It showcases the product in the environment it was intended, which helps a potential customer imagine owning the product. So, where do you start with lifestyle photography? The first step is to figure out how many photos you need and what you want in the photos. To do this, let's go to your Shopify admin.
Let's open your Shopify store and go through the store to review what we'll need in terms of photos. We're using the free Brooklyn theme, which is one of the most popular themes and it requires quite a few photos. You can follow the same process we're going to do with any theme that you choose. To start, we're going to scroll through the website and develop a shot list of the lifestyle photography you'll need. Click the link below to create your editable spreadsheet, where you can start tracking the photos you'll need.
Let's open the shot list template right beside our store so we can list out the photos we need. If you have a brand mood board, take a look at it to remind yourself of the tone you're trying to convey with your store. To start, I need a homepage header image. I'll need two images that go with this text about my brand. I'll write those down.
You'll notice that there is a column in this spreadsheet to write down the image size and shape. This is also known as the aspect ratio. You don't need to be precise here, but knowing if you want a vertical or horizontal image is helpful in sourcing photos. Repeat this process with each page on your Shopify store. So, once you have your list, what do you do next? The easiest and least-expensive option for high quality lifestyle photography is to use Burst.
Burst is a stock photo platform from Shopify and it offers free, high-resolution images. When you're using stock photos, it's important to be sure that they're licensed for commercial use. That means the image owner has said it's okay for you to use the photo in order to help you make money. In this case, for you to post the image on your store. All the photos you see on Burst are licensed for commercial use, which makes your job of selecting images a lot more fun.
If you need images from other sites, just make sure that they're high quality and they do have the commercial license attached to them. Any stock photo site will make these elements easy for you to find. You can visit Burst using the link included in the resources. You can also access Burst images directly through the theme editor when when you begin customizing your theme. Complete the process of going through your website and deciding which lifestyle photos you need.
Once you have the list of what you need, finding them is a lot easier. You can find them on Burst or a different stock photography website, take the photos yourself, or hire a photographer to help you with this. You've completed an important step in the process of creating your online store.
